


Flying Blind

by Mohini



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Drug Withdrawal, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Panic Attacks, Safewords, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 09:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3972673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mohini/pseuds/Mohini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We're finally working through the opiate elephant in the living room, but there's a good chance it's going to crush us both before it leaves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flying Blind

**Author's Note:**

> The warnings mean it, my friends. Withdrawal isn't elegant, and this fic definitely isn't. It's more or less a timestamp before the start of _Calling _. Enter at your own risk, and while you're here, do please take care of yourselves.__

Watching the man I love more than anything in the world is breaking my heart into tiny, brittle pieces. He made the decision a week ago that the time had come to sober up and dig his way out of the life that’s bound to kill him sooner or later. Never mind that said decision came on the heels of one of our mutual friends ODing in front of him. I don’t care anymore what it took. I’m just glad something got through to him. Although at the moment, I’m not sure glad is the word I should use.

It’s been three days since we flushed the last of his stash, and in that time he’s descended into such misery that I cannot imagine he knows much of anything anymore. The whole world has constricted down to the bed on which he is currently curled into a fetal knot and whimpering in agony. He’s vomited so much in the last few days that we gave up on getting to the toilet and have resorted to a plastic bucket, a bucket he is dragging toward his mouth yet again as he lets out a pitiful moan before choking up a thin string of bile. 

My frantic research via Google has assured me that day three is the peak of physical symptoms, and that it will get better from here. I hope to any god willing to listen that’s the truth. I’ve been keeping towels under him to soak up the sweat that pours from his ravaged body. His bowels are a gurgling, clenching mess, and he can’t stop vomiting long enough to sleep more than an hour at a time.

He’s taking it in turns to writhe on the bed or shakily roam the apartment, leaning heavily on me and whining that he has to move, that he has to, that his skin is fucking crawling and he’s got to keep moving. Everything hurts. The lightest touch has him in tears and yet he craves contact. This is, without a doubt, a living hell. 

He’s been on something or another for most of the time I’ve known him, which is saying a lot considering we met at age 11. I would have called him a functioning addict in our school days, Adderall and Vicodin were his poisons of choice back then. I remember being frightened the first time I watched him crush a pill and snort it in the locker room. What I wouldn’t do to go back to those days and tell him how it would turn out. College came and if anything he seemed to be doing better. I didn’t know until he moved in with me our junior year that the absence of pill popping was actually the commencement of liquid fire injected into his veins. I have no idea how he got through school stoned or flying in alternating waves of insanity. But he did, which is perhaps testament to his absolutely frightening intellect.

He landed a job at a high profile firm straight out of school, working his ass into the ground from day one. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t doing much in the way of heroin by then, having abandoned it in favor of ever increasing dosages of stimulants to get the next big project done on little to no sleep. We were still living together, me in blissful ignorance of just what he was doing to bring himself back down to earth in between projects. 

Then came the overdose. I found him in his bedroom, the fucking needle still in his arm. A wailing, high speed run in an ambulance and a hell of a lot of narcan later, he was conscious and furious. He signed out AMA, and didn’t speak to me again for a solid month. How we managed it while living in an apartment the size of a tin can, I may never know. 

I found myself checking on him in the middle of the night, watching the rise and fall of his chest to reassure myself that he was, indeed, still breathing. Somewhere in there, he slowed down, stopped using as much, and yet again I was fooled by his calm assurances that everything was fine, that it had been a mistake and not one he was going to repeat. In the two years that followed, I’d been blissfully unaware of what a lie that had been until the night a week ago when he came home and fell into my arms, sobbing that Greg was dead and that he needed my help.

A tour of his home office yielded enough heroin to get the pair of us a one way ticket to eternal imprisonment in a federal facility. A small part of me feared for the safety of the groundwater and anything potentially coming in contact with it as we flushed the lot of it, leaving only enough for him to taper down over the course of a few days, counting down to what he referred to jokingly as hell week. Watching him now, that was certainly an apt term.

“Oh god,” he whimpers, “M’sorry, m’sorry, m’sorry.” The words are crammed together and I can’t figure out what’s changed for a moment and then I realize, as he retches yet again into the bucket, that he’s lost control of his bowels and is now lying in his own waste, shivering and puking and drenched in sweat. 

There’s nothing for it. I hold my breath and gather him into my arms, carrying his painfully thin body into the bathroom and putting him in the tub. I turn the taps and spray him down with the shower nozzle, soaping his skin and rinsing him while he keeps right on crying and dry heaving. The poor guy’s exploding from all ends, and I just keep washing him down until it passes, leaving him shuddering and gasping for breath. 

I wrap him in a towel, wedge him into the space between the toilet and the tub, and tell him to stay put while I clean up in the bedroom. I strip the bed and drag the lot of it to the seriously overworked washing machine, trying not to hear him screaming for me from the bathroom. I hope to hell the neighbors don’t call the fucking cops on us. But given the neighborhood, I doubt it’s the worst thing they’ve heard lately. We upgraded a year or so ago from student ghetto to the land of starter homes. It’s a decent enough part of town, but if I’ve learned anything in the last few years it’s that pretty faces hide ugly secrets.

I haul the latest load of fresh sheets and towels from the dryer and throw them in the corner of the bedroom. Then I put fresh sheets on the bed, layer a couple more towels over them, and go to retrieve him. He’s whimpering again, cheek pressed against the toilet seat and body curled over it. His stomach clenches so hard it makes me hurt just to watch and he chokes up air and pain and nothing more. I kneel beside him, wiping him down with a hastily soaked cloth and whispering in his ear that I’m back, that it’s going to be alright, that I love him and that we’re going to get through this. He nods, lurches sideways, and settles in my arms.

He barely even conscious anymore when he says it, the word that has been our safe word since we were 16 years old and didn’t have the first clue why we even needed one but did it anyway, just because it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

“Mercury, oh fuck, Harry, Mercury, please, please, don’t leave me, please don’t leave,” he’s saying over and over and over, and my face is wet with my own tears as I hold him close and kiss his sweat soaked face. 

“Shhh, baby, shhh, I’m here, I’m right here, I’m not leaving, baby, I’ve got you,” I tell him, panicking and kicking myself for leaving him alone. We don’t scene much these days, it’s one of those things that got lost in between long work hours and the heroin shaped elephant in the living room. But abandonment of any kind was always an absolute no for him. 

I scramble to my feet, hoisting him up with me and head back to the bedroom, depositing him on the bed only long enough to strip out of my own clothes and lie down beside him, pulling him close to me and hoping like hell that skin contact would work now as it had in the past when he’d called it out. 

“Shh,” I keep repeating my lips at his ear as I hold him tightly against me. “You can feel me, I’m right here, I’ve got you, I’m right here with you. Come back to me, me love, I know you can hear me, come back now.” I find myself wondering if I’ve lost my mind. The man is detoxing like all hell and here I’m treating him like he’s coming out of sex gone too rough, but it’s all I can think to do because in all honesty, I’ve been flying blind for three days now and it’s not getting any easier. 

He’s still bawling, but he’s starting to calm down, the frantic edge receding from his tone and he’s just saying my name over and over, no longer begging me to stay. I read that panic attacks weren’t altogether uncommon during detox. It would figure that one of the things he gets fucked up to avoid would be part of the side effects of getting off the stuff. 

When he goes quiet, I put a shaking hand on his upper lip, the soft, warm puff of his breath more reassuring than it ought to be. I’m pretty sure he’s passed out from the aftereffects of the panic attack, but I’m grateful for the rest it’s afforded him nonetheless. I lie there, pressed tightly against him and praying that this time, when he wakes he’ll be on the upswing.

It turns out, God is out of the office and not currently checking voicemail. Draco wakes with a groan and I barely get the bucket in front of his mouth fast enough to avoid yet another sheet change. 

“Kill me,” he whines. 

I’m unreasonably grateful for a coherent sentence, even if it is one asking for his demise. “Too late, love. Too invested in keeping your skinny ass alive,” I tell him, hoping desperately that he will hear the humor I’m trying for. 

“If you haven’t killed me yet, I guess you’re in it to stay,” he says softly, settling against me and breathing slowly and deeply. He’s still shaking, and I can feel the cold sweat still pouring from him. This is a lull, one just like the few we’ve gotten thus far, the few moments after he’s gotten a fleeting bit of rest in which he is coherent enough to still be him. 

“As long as you’ll have me,” I tell him, kissing his damp forehead and brushing a hand through his tangled hair.

“M’so fucking done with this,” he says.

“I think we’re about through the worst of it,” I tell him, hoping like hell that it’s true. 

“Mmhmm,” he murmurs. I can hear his gut gurgling and he places a slim hand against his sunken abdomen and grimaces. I don’t need an explanation at this point, simply climb from the bed and carry him into the bathroom to settle him atop the toilet, bucket within reach. Any boundaries we used to have are long since gone, and he leans against me as his body continues to try to rid itself of everything that’s ever been put in it. I’ve been feeding him immodium like it’s candy, but nothing seems to help by much. By the time he’s settled again, the chills are back and he’s shaking uncontrollably, teeth chattering against one another as he clings to me. 

I haul him back to bed, cover him with a blanket that I know will be thrown to the floor within the next hour when the chills turn to fevered heat once more. He reaches up for me and I climb in with him, wrapping my arms around him and holding him close as he whispers thanks for not leaving him, for loving him, for holding him. “I love you,” I tell him in reply, and he repeats the words back, still shaking and miserable but there’s hope in those words, and that’s all I need to know we’re going to get through this.


End file.
